Sky Mavis, the company behind the leading non-fungible token game Axie Infinity, has raised US$152 million in a Series B funding round with a valuation of almost US$3 billion, according to news outlet.
The Information Led by venture capital agency Andreessen Horowitz, Sky Mavis said it’ll use the funds to enhance its blockchain gaming infrastructure and construct a distribution platform for different blockchain-based games. As part of the deal, Arianna Simpson, a normal partner at Andreessen, will be a part of the board of Sky Mavis.
The funding round’s timing is inauspicious, however, as the game posted its first month-over-month loss since its historic rise earlier in the year began, with profits in September falling 40% from the previous month. Whereas still significant, the NFT-based game last month earned 64,933.71 ether (ETH), price US$220.32 million — down from US$342 million in August, in accordance with data from Axie World.
Axie Infinity’s growth was led by its play-to-earn function, which allowed gamers to earn the in-game cryptocurrency “SLP” by breeding and battling Pokémon-like creatures known as Axies. However, as the game has grown more in style, the value of SLP has steadily decreased after hitting a high of US$0.3355 in June, falling more than 80% since then. In order to assist address this, builders have recently adjusted the quantity of SLP players are rewarded in-game in an effort to recalibrate the availability.
“There was too much supply of SLP, and no one was breeding Axies,” an Axie player who prefers to go by his online name “Porky” advised recently, including the earlier system disincentivized the spending of SLP from creating new Axies. “SLP is free money, it simply generates and generates. That’s why it crashed, and the developers had to balance it.”
Sky Mavis has also recently announced its plans on developing its personal decentralized exchange for the game in order to lower the friction for gamers who need to trade SLP and the game’s governance token AXS. In contrast to SLP, AXS has continued to increase consistently in value in recent months, with its value leaping over 100% in a matter of hours after the announcement of the DEX was made, briefly reaching US$153.57. It has since declined quite steeply, however, and was trading at US$123.03 at press time, according to CoinMarketCap.
Source: forkastnews